My friend Roger wrote me to recommend a blog, Thoughts...Stop Nagging Me! by Amitava "Jay" Mazumdar. I'm still rather pressed for time, so I haven't yet had the chance to do anything but glance at it, but since I trust Roger's judgment implicitly, I'm passing his recommendation on, and I've added it to the blogroll.

It's been hard for me to figure out exactly what it was that motivated the Bush administration to start a war that its own intelligence demonstrated was unnecessary. Rep. Dennis Kucinich on Diane Riehm this morning accused the Bush administration of fighting the war purely for domestic political reasons. Others believe the war is meant solely to line the pockets of wealthy contributors. However arrogant I believe the Bush administration is, I don't think it's evil.

[...]

It's clear to me that this war is the result of ideological zealotry that existed prior to September 11, 2001. The neoconservatives were absolutely committed to overthrowing Saddam's regime, no matter the financial or political cost, or the implications to international law. We know now that the war had little to do with WMDs, as their commitment is not lessened by our failure to find any. So what gives?

I think that the neoconservatives have persuaded themselves that the security of the United States is intricately and irrevocably linked to Israeli security. Any threat to Israel, in this view of the world, is a threat to the United States, irrespective of the fact that the Palestinian terror groups have shown little interest in attacking U.S. interests and have demonstrated no links to al Qaeda. As such, this war for Iraq isn't so much a war to liberate the Iraqi people as it was a war to reduce Israel's list of enemies by one, and then pressure Israel's hostile neighbors, from a new position of strength within the region, to withdraw their support for anti-Israel terrorist organizations.

[...]

I think any reasonable person not blinded by ideology would have to concede that preemptively overthrowing an Arab government and occupying an Arab country, at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, solely for the sake of another nation is good samaritanism gone mad -- and not least because the solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict has been time again proven to not be military victory, but a political settlement.

If you read unfutz at least once a week, without fail, your teeth will be whiter and your love life more satisfying.

If you read it daily, I will come to your house, kiss you on the forehead, bathe your feet, and cook pancakes for you, with yummy syrup and everything.

(You might want to keep a watch on me, though, just to avoid the syrup ending up on your feet and the pancakes on your forehead.)

Finally, on a more mundane level, since I don't believe that anyone actually reads this stuff, I make this offer: I'll give five bucks to the first person who contacts me and asks for it -- and, believe me, right now five bucks might as well be five hundred, so this is no trivial offer.